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Hawaii Electric Light reports that customers in the Hilo and Puna districts experienced brief power interruptions due to lightning strikes from a storm system that swept through the island late yesterday afternoon. About 1,250 customers in the Hilo area experienced a longer interruption of about 1½ hours. Most customers were restored by early evening.

“After lightning strikes damaged utility equipment, crews responded immediately and rerouted electricity to restore power to most customers,” said company spokesperson Rhea Lee-Moku. “Our transmission and distribution systems are designed with redundancies, or duplicate critical components, that provide alternate routes if one component fails or is damaged. This allows us to improve reliability and restore power to customers more quickly until permanent repairs can be made.”

Following a damage assessment, crews will prioritize repairs to the equipment damaged by lightning.

To report an outage, please call 969-6666. Hawaii Electric Light also posts outage information on its Twitter account @HIElectricLight with the hashtag #BigIslandOutage.

Hawaii Electric Light reports a brief power interruption occurred on Friday, July 1, when a combustion turbine unit at its Keahole Power Plant tripped offline.

Maintenance crews were testing the unit (CT5) when it unexpectedly tripped. About 15,000 customers in various areas of the island experienced a six-minute power interruption while backup generators were started. Service was restored to all affected customers at 9:38 a.m.

“We’re in the process of investigating what caused the unit to suddenly trip,” said Rhea Lee-Moku, Hawaii Electric Light spokesperson. “We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience the interruption may have caused and want to thank the community for their patience and understanding.”

This evening on the Big Island of Hawaii, residents across the island reported that they had lost electricity for a time tonight. From Puna to Kona the outages were reported.

Hawaiian Electric Companies is currently investigating the power failure but has tentatively classified this as a “frequency trip on the system”.When they have determined the exact cause of the island-wide outage I will update this post.